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Photos from the Surface of Venus
Mean_Nishka writes "I was surprised to learn that the Soviets sucessfully landed a number of probes on the surface of Venus (the probes were given the name 'Venera') in the 70's and early 80's. NASA has a small collection of images from four of the missions. The images aren't much, but offer a stunning view of the surface of Venus. You can view surface photos at this NASA site. Space.com has a great summary of the Venera program here."
At last I have hope that my lost car keys might show up in one of these photos. I've looked everywhere else for them.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I thought everyone knew about these. It's almost like never hearing that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. And hey! We've got Space Shuttles now! Or at least had them.
Everyone should know all they can about space exploration. Start at the beginning. Look up the list of early launches (back in the 1960's) to the moon, Venus, and Mars. Find the first closeup. photograph of Phobos ever taken. Learn what happened to the spacecraft. Investigate the technology behind the first photo of the backside of the moon. (a portable film development laboratory and a fax machine!!!). Marvel at the precision landing of a LEM near a Surveyor. Ooogle at the footage of a Ranger crashing into the Moon.
There's a lot of shit out there, and it's important enough that any geek should be ashamed to admit they'd never heard of Venera.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Check the Venus fact sheet - namely the surface temperature, pressure and the composition of the Venus atmosphere - and you will find reasons why their best time of the probe functioning (before disintegrating) was approx one hour. If you do not like their camera optics and mounting, please volunteer to take better pictures by yourself.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Venus fact sheet is here http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/ven usfact.html
Armstrong, Aldrin land on Moon
Kennedy beats Nixon by narrow margin
Allies land on Normandy beach -- D-Day has arrived!
AFAIK, the Soviet lunar probes did not start on a murderous Six Million Dollar Man-style rampage upon returning to earth.
The Soviets had much more success with their Venus probes than with their Mars probes. The reason is that Venus' atmosphere is so thick that a probe practically floats down like it is under water. The top of the probes had a hat-like thingy that acted like a small parachute.
On the flip-side, Mars landings are *still* difficult. It has enough gravity to require carefully timed decents, has wind gusts that can swing probes around, and sharp boulders, yet the atmosphere is not quite thick enough to make parachutes very effective. Mars ate up Soviet probes like Mars Bars, and a US probe also.
Table-ized A.I.
When Russian speakers borrow foreign words, they usually keep the original gender (feminine in this case, despite the fact that the Latin nominative plural ends in -us which usually means masculine), and they usually take the root form of other cases rather than just the nominative singular ("Vener-" rather than "Venus"). In Russian, feminine nouns usually end in "-a" (or "-ya", which is a different letter). So to borrow the word Venus from Latin, Russian took the base form "Vener-" and tacked an "-a" on the end of it because it was feminine to make "Venera".
I believe genus/generis (pl. genera) is declined (has grammatical endings tacked on) in the same way as "Venus", so yes, if she were cloned there would be two Venera. (But in Russian Venera is the singular.) Penis is declined in a different way; the Latin plural would be penes.
Not that anybody's life is really improved by knowing this, of course. :-)
You assume the atmosphere is homogenous. Thermal differences between blocks of the atmosphere on Earth can produce refraction. It's how you get mirages.
It's also how you can sometimes "see" heat rising off objects. Warmed air rising off a hot object can have a perceptibly different index of refraction from the ambient air surrounding it. This produces optical distortion of objects viewed through the warmed air.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Basically, they had no idea how much light was reaching the surface. The probe wouldn't have lived long enough for manual gain control (it would have to take a picture, send it to Earth, the Russians would have to process it, adjust the gain, send the gain adjust command to the probe, repeat until a usable image comes back), so they gave the probe's on-board camera automatic gain control.
Once they got the image from the probe, they converted the raw logarithmic data into a more usable format. Then it was adjusted to be viewable by a human.